Ernest Hemingway began his career blessed lavishly by the gods. As a rugged young journalist, with a radiant, adoring wife, he dazzled the expatriate and artistic community of Paris in 1922 with his exuberance, gregariousness and exceptional good looks, including “the most beautiful row of teeth” the writer Max Eastman had ever seen. As Mary V. Dearborn notes in her authoritative biography, Hemingway “virtually commanded affection, admiration and attention.” His first books of character sketches and stories showed that he had literary talent as well, with an understated style stripped of euphemism, piety and cant. “In the golden city at a golden time,” Dearborn writes, “he would appear a golden young man.”

With the publication of “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, Hemingway put a stamp on his spectacular literary career. Rapidly hailed as an important American writer, he became first a celebrity and then a legend, with his voracious pursuit of the adventurous roles and violent rituals of masculine contest. As he aged, however, that myth of heroic virility seemed increasingly untenable. He extolled male camaraderie, but was driven to betray and demolish his friends. He deserted his Paris wife, Hadley Richardson, and in three more marriages became more demanding of women’s adulation and service, more selfish and abusive. As his third wife, the writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn, observed, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” And after World War II, Hemingway’s claim to literary genius seemed suspect as well. “How can a man in his senses,” John Dos Passos wondered when “Across the River and Into the Trees” came out in 1950, leave such garbage “on the page?” The international success of “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) redeemed his literary reputation for a while, and secured the Nobel Prize. But his suicide on July 2, 1961, was so shockingly at odds with the hypermasculine persona he had cultivated and protected that it undermined critical evaluations of his aesthetic standing as well. Harold Bloom saw him the same way he saw Updike, as “a minor novelist with a major style.” His golden legend became the tragic saga of a man destroyed by his demons and hiding despair. Yet Hemingway’s outsize life and controversial achievement has continued to be a magnet to biographers, and Dearborn is the first woman to join their company. A perceptive and tough-minded biographer, who has written about other fabled icons of masculinity — Henry Miller, Norman Mailer — Dearborn has now tackled the big one. A feminist biography, then? Not exactly. Her chief asset as a female biographer, she insists, is her immunity to the hairy-chested, competitive Hemingway legend. Dearborn wants to opt out of the legend business and focus instead on “what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer.”

Dearborn delved into the Hemingway family archives in Texas, and she gives rewarding attention to her subject’s relationships with his father, his five siblings and especially his mother. Grace Hemingway is often seen as domineering and emasculating; Ernest claimed to hate her for her sanctimonious condemnation of his early fiction, and blamed her for his father’s suicide. Dearborn contends, however, that she was artistically talented, creative and charismatic. It’s well-known that she dressed little Ernest in frills with a long blond bob, as the twin of his older sister, Marcelline. But she also encouraged his skill with guns; at the age of 2, she boasted, “Ernest shoots well with his gun and loads it and cocks it himself.” Guns would be part of his legend, from the Tommy gun he used to shoot sharks in Bimini to the doublebarreled shotgun with which he killed himself. The cover of Dearborn’s biography pictures him aiming the Tommy gun straight at the reader, as if to demand we read the book.

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Dearborn traces Hemingway’s “persistent confusion about gender identity” to Grace’s androgynous mothering style. His hair fetish, a sexual fascination with matching short haircuts and bleached blond hair for men and women, which became a theme in the gender-bending posthumous novel “The Garden of Eden,” could be judged as a shameful secret, but also, she argues, as “openness to fluidity in gender boundaries.” Of course, that openness could be risky for a macho superhero in the 1950s. When he wanted to get his ears pierced in Africa, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, sent a tactful note to dissuade him: “Your wearing earrings will have a deleterious effect on your reputation.” Dearborn is incisive about the ways each wife handled the difficult bargain she had made in marrying a legend.

She also stresses his genetic predisposition to manic depression and suicide: “Mental illness coursed through the Hemingway family like one of the rivers Ernest wrote about with such beautiful economy.” This dark legacy was exacerbated by his experiences in World War I, his alcoholism and the five traumatic brain injuries he suffered over his lifetime. Nevertheless, she holds Hemingway culpable for inflating his legend from the very beginning. Returning to Michigan as a wounded soldier, he played the “professional veteran” in interviews. En route to Paris with Hadley, he was “constructing myths about himself before he got off the boat.” By the 1940s, he was regularly telling “tall tales” about his war heroism, “an exaggeration or lie in nearly every sentence.” These falsities, she believes, began to infect his fiction as well. In “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), she charges, his “concerns about authenticity” in writing, political commitment, love and experience were cheapened by the “repeated use of the word ‘truly.’ Authenticity truly loses.”

Dearborn skillfully covers an enormous range of rich material; she is an indefatigable researcher. But I’m not an indefatigable reader, and her insistence on using every minute detail slows the momentum of Hemingway’s story. Even his terrible last year of depression, drugs, hospitalization, shock treatment and memory loss is high drama. But after following his inexorable march toward suicide for hundreds of pages, I just wanted him to shoot that Chekhovian gun.

Ultimately, the scale of Hemingway’s life is so colossal and his motives so convoluted that no biographer, however gifted, can neatly sever the legend from the life, or have the last word on its meaning. This spring, two other books take up more tightly focused aspects of Hemingway’s life; in “The Ambulance Drivers,” James McGrath Morris looks closely at the difficult friendship of Hemingway and Dos Passos, and in “Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy,” Nicholas Reynolds uncovers Hemingway’s “secret adventures” in espionage between 1935 and 1961. Dearborn includes elements of both studies in her capacious volume, but she ends with another portrait of the artist as a victim of both his self-destructive urges and a genetic fate he could not prevent. His final failing, she concludes, was his inability “to tell the truth, even to himself.” Yet his life is still potent and compelling to writers and readers, and his posthumous fiction, especially “The Garden of Eden,” reveals that he was trying to tell new truths about himself. It’s time to reconsider the paradigm of his tragic decline. That’s one more Hemingway legend the next biographer could overthrow.

Correction:June 11, 2017

A review on May 28 about “Ernest Hemingway: A Biography,” by Mary V. Dearborn, misidentified the type of gun Hemingway is aiming directly into the camera in the photograph on the book’s cover. It is a Thompson submachine gun, not a pistol.

Elaine Showalter is the author, most recently, of “The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography.”